by Ian Kershaw
In western Germany, probably more than in eastern areas, the collapsing control of the regime offered possibilities, despite the terror, for groups of citizens, women often prominent among them, sometimes led by local ‘worthies’ such as priests or doctors, to take the initiative to prevent the destruction of their townships. They could, if they were fortunate, win support from the mayor or other local government officials and win over the combat commandant.88 Much hinged upon the individuals concerned, their readiness to take action, the stance of the local Party officials, and the presence of the SS or Wehrmacht troops insistent upon terrorizing any seen as ‘defeatists’. In Stuttgart, the mayor, Dr Karl Strölin, himself a Nazi, was persuaded by anti-Nazi local notables to ignore the demands of the Gauleiter of Württemberg, Wilhelm Murr, who was fanatically determined to fight on and punish any who stood in his way. Strölin, gaining the support of the new combat commandant’s superior and through him the Wehrmacht commander in the area, opened clandestine negotiations with the Allies. On 22 April Stuttgart was surrendered without a struggle.89
On occasion, direct action prevented the worst. In the picturesque small town of Bad Windsheim in Lower Franconia, in the most spectacular of a number of demonstrations led by women against the destruction of their towns, 200–300 women, some of them with their children, protested in early April about the decision of the local military commander to hold out against the imminent arrival of strong American forces.90 After a tense confrontation, Bad Windsheim eventually fell without being subjected to total destruction and heavy loss of life. Such courageous protests were, however, not always effective. In Lahr, in the south of Baden, a large group of women in rebellious mood, hurling insults at Hitler and the Party, persuaded a delegation of the town’s officials to seek agreement from the local Wehrmacht commandant to surrender without a fight. Waiting for the return of the delegation, the women hoisted white flags throughout the town, and started the bell tolling to signal surrender. Their hopes were premature. The delegation returned empty-handed. The SS commandant insisted on the defence of Lahr, warning the women that if the white flags were not withdrawn that evening his own men would open fire on the town. Instead of surrender, battle raged throughout the night and into the next day before the town fell to the French, who then looted houses and shops, saying that the SS had behaved worse in France.91
Such actions to try to avoid futile destruction when all was obviously lost could provoke a drastic response. Hundreds of German citizens fell victim to uncontrolled violence in the last weeks of the Nazi regime. Examples could be multiplied without difficulty.92 Following the women’s demonstration in Bad Windsheim, for instance, one woman, wrongly selected (probably because of her reputation as a critic of the NSDAP) as the ringleader by a hit-squad sent down by the Gestapo in Nuremberg, was cold-bloodedly shot in front of her husband and daughter and a notice pinned to her body announcing that ‘a traitor has been executed’.93 In Schwäbisch Gmünd, a small town in Württemberg not far from Stuttgart, the Kreisleiter and combat commandant had two men executed just before midnight on 19 April, hours before the Americans entered the town without a fight. One of the men was known to have been an opponent of the Nazis since 1933, when he had been arrested for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets and returned from his stay in a concentration camp a changed person, psychiatrically disturbed. The other was a former soldier, no longer fit to fight after a serious injury. In a heated argument about handing over the city or fighting on, with the certainty of the destruction of the lovely town with its beautiful medieval minster, they had been heard to shout, probably under the influence of alcohol, ‘Drop dead Hitler. Long live Stauffenberg. Long live freedom.’ The two were removed from their police cells late at night, taken to a wood at the edge of the town and shot dead. The local Nazi representatives were ensuring, with their last act of power, that long-standing opponents would not live to enjoy their downfall. Even as the executions were taking place, the Kreisleiter and his entourage were preparing to flee from the town.94
An extreme case was the arbitrary shooting dead of four civilians, among them a pastor, in a suburb of Heilbronn on 6 April when the local Kreisleiter, Richard Drauz, and a group of fanatics (three of them in the Volkssturm) fleeing by car together with him as the Americans approached came across a street in which white flags hung from several houses. In a rage, he stopped the car, ordering his men ‘out, shoot, shoot everybody’. Drauz’s accomplices arbitrarily shot down their victims, men and women, within a frenzied few minutes, narrowly missing several others, before driving off.95
Others fell victim not to random shootings or the actions of hit-squads, but to the brutal summary ‘justice’ of the ‘flying court martial’. One such mobile court travelled through parts of southern Germany in a grey Mercedes under the leadership of Major Erwin Helm, ‘a special kind of berserker’, proud of an earlier head-wound that had left part of his brain protruding through his skull. Passing close to the village of Zellingen in Lower Franconia at the end of March, Helm’s attention was drawn by the commander of the local Volkssturm battalion, a doctor, to a sixty-year-old farmer, Karl Weiglein, who had allegedly made a sarcastic comment during a pep-talk for the battalion, then later remarked that those responsible for blowing up the nearby bridge over the Main should be hanged. Helm’s instant reaction, before hearing any details of the incidents, was that Weiglein should be executed. When the hurriedly constituted court martial – there was no defender – took too long over its deliberations, Helm threatened to proclaim the sentence himself and prepared the place of execution while the ‘court’ was meeting. As soon as the inevitable death sentence was pronounced, he hung a notice round Weiglein’s neck: ‘Sentenced to Death for Sabotage of the Wehrmacht and Mutiny’. In a particularly sadistic move, Weiglein was hanged from a branch of the pear-tree just beneath the window of his farmhouse while insults were hurled at his horror-struck wife.96
Walter Fernau, an NSFO and member of Helm’s squad who had prosecuted Weiglein and demanded the death sentence, still justified it many years later. ‘I really cannot say to you’, he told his interviewer decades after the event, ‘that at the time I thought that was too harsh.’ He took the view that Weiglein was guilty even though the case against him was not proven. The situation necessitated harsh measures, he argued. There was also the deterrent effect. Helm said, Fernau claimed to recall, ‘that he has to be hanged and kept on display so that the Zellingen Volkssturm people see, well, if we step out of line we’ll get the same as him’. The court rightly, in his view, did not have powers to give prison sentences. A few months in prison while others were dying would have been unjust. From the first to the last day of belonging to Helm’s battalion, said Fernau, ‘I never had the sense that I had made myself guilty.’97
Though anyone seen to stand in the regime’s way now ran the serious risk of summary execution, the main targets of the ‘crimes of the last phase’ were nevertheless not random, but real or imagined opponents of the regime, defeatists, ‘subversives’, supposed ‘shirkers’, presumed deserters or ‘cowards’, or anyone welcoming the end of Nazism or the arrival of the enemy. In this sense, the violence differed from the style of savagely arbitrary collective reprisals that had frequently been inflicted earlier in the war on the peoples of Nazi-occupied Europe. When directed by Germans against their fellow countrymen in the last weeks, the horror had a different pattern. Old scores were settled. Personal animosities, little to do with ideology, played their part. So did feelings of sheer revenge. Long-standing opponents were arbitrarily dispatched to prevent their enjoying their moment of triumph.
Ideological indoctrination was, however, far from insignificant. Now as before, the worst of the murderous violence was directed at the perceived racial or political enemies of the regime, foreign workers and, above all, concentration camp prisoners. Out of 288 ‘crimes of the last phase’ bringing convictions in post-war trials in West Germany, 114 (39.6 per cent, the highest single proportion) related to the shooti
ng of prisoners and foreign workers. Apart from members of the Gestapo and other police units, Volkssturm men and prison personnel were most prominent among the convicted killers.98
Prominent individuals who had been involved in the resistance to Hitler could not be allowed to witness his downfall. Among those who had formerly belonged to the opposition within the Abwehr (German military counter-intelligence) Hans von Dohnanyi, who had worked for Hitler’s downfall since 1938, was hanged in Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 9 April after a farcical ‘trial’ before an SS court martial. A similar fate in Flossenbürg the same day befell Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, former head of the Abwehr, Colonel Hans Oster, who had been part of a plot against Hitler in 1938 and had leaked German invasion plans to the Dutch in 1940, and the evangelical theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose courageous attempts to persuade the western Allies to support the resistance in Germany had come to nothing. In Dachau, Georg Elser, the Swabian joiner who had tried to blow up Hitler in 1939 was also murdered (without even the semblance of a trial).99 But such killings were merely the tip of the iceberg. With the regime lurching almost visibly out of control, prisoners, whether in concentration camps or in state penitentiaries, lived or died at the whim of their guards or jailers. Violence towards prisoners, already escalating wildly, now became ubiquitous.100 It was even prompted in some cases by the military leadership. When his forces were cut off in the Ruhr, Field-Marshal Model ordered on 7 April that prisoners in penitentiaries, including those under remand for political offences, should be handed to the police for ‘examination’. The execution of more than 200 prisoners followed. There were numerous other killings in the final hours before penal institutions were evacuated, or before the Allies arrived. Where an official executioner could not get to a penitentiary on time, prison officials – rewarded with money and cigarettes – carried out the killings. In one subsidiary of Emsland camp, a young apprentice chimney-sweep, wearing an army captain’s uniform, turned up and ordered the execution of dozens of prisoners. Astonishingly, his orders were followed, a sign of the mounting chaos in the collapsing regime. More than a hundred prisoners were executed over the next few days.101
VI
Amid the gathering mayhem and murderous frenzy, the violence and killing of the death marches of concentration camp prisoners in the final weeks of the regime mark a separate unholy chapter.
The hurried, often chaotic, evacuations and subsequent terrible death marches of prisoners from Auschwitz, Groß-Rosen, Stutthof and other camps in the east, which we followed in Chapter 6, had at least a semblance of underlying rationale – from the regime’s perspective. The prisoners were to be kept out of the hands of the enemy and brought back into the interior of the Reich where – in theory, though scarcely in practice for such emaciated, exhausted, frozen, starved, beaten and otherwise maltreated human beings – they could be available for labour, or, as Himmler saw it, as potential pawns in any deal with the Allies. Those who were not killed en route, or who did not die from exhaustion or exposure to the bitter winter conditions, eventually reached camps within Germany, including Bergen-Belsen.
Following two days of negotiations and, amazingly, Himmler’s permission to hand over rather than evacuate the camp – unaware (given the dramatic decline in the already dreadful conditions in the camp over recent weeks) of exactly what horrors he was revealing, and hoping to exploit his ‘humanitarian’ gesture in his dealings with Bernadotte – British troops entered Bergen-Belsen on 15 April. Most SS guards had by then left. Around 50,000 prisoners, in a state closer to death than life, were liberated. Thousands of decomposing corpses, many of them dead in the typhus epidemic that had raged for weeks lay around. Some 37,000 had died since February, more than 9,000 in the two weeks before the liberation of the camp. Another 14,000 were to die from the effects of their suffering in the camp in the following weeks.102 That Bergen-Belsen was handed over, not evacuated, was a unique occurrence. The typhus epidemic ruled out evacuation.103 In all other camps, an attempt was made to remove the prisoners before the camp could be taken by the enemy.
In March, as part of his attempt to reach some arrangement with the Allies, Himmler had ordered that Jews should be treated like other prisoners, informing camp commandants that they were no longer to be killed, and that the death rate among prisoners should be reduced by all possible means.104 On the last day of March, the commandant of Buchenwald was expecting the camp to be handed over to the Allies. Within less than a week that had diametrically altered. Himmler now ordered the camp’s prisoners, where possible, to be sent to Flossenbürg.105 In this, as an order sent to the commandant of Flossenbürg in mid-April made clear, he reverted to the policy that there could be no question of surrendering concentration camps and that no prisoner should be allowed to fall alive into enemy hands.106 Hitler’s reaction to reports that newly liberated prisoners from Buchenwald had made their way to nearby Weimar and had looted and raped had probably caused the reversion.107 Himmler now pressed for the swift evacuation of Mittelbau-Dora and Buchenwald. During the night of 4/5 April removal of the Mittelbau prisoners in the direction of the concentration camps in Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Mauthausen began, and ended within forty-eight hours or so.108
On 11 April American soldiers reached the camp complex at Mittelbau-Dora, where they found 700 ill and emaciated prisoners, soon afterwards encountering further horrific scenes as they liberated the subsidiary camps. When the Americans arrived in Buchenwald, the largest camp in Germany, on 13 April, an unimaginably gruesome experience, they found around 21,000 prisoners – many little more than walking skeletons – remaining in the camp out of the complement of 48,000 little more than a week earlier. The rest had set out, by rail or on foot, between 7 and 10 April, heading for the concentration camps many kilometres away to the south of Flossenbürg and Dachau, themselves bursting at the seams with swollen numbers of prisoners.109 These camps, too, and those still remaining at Mauthausen (not far from Linz in Austria), Sachsenhausen (just outside Berlin), Neuengamme (near Hamburg) and Ravensbrück (a women’s camp, about 80 kilometres north of Berlin), would evacuate their prisoners capable of marching, under catastrophic circumstances and with no obvious destination, during the second half of April.110
The Buchenwald prisoners were among the numerous long columns of bedraggled, gaunt, shrunken figures from the remaining concentration camps now being driven by their merciless guards hundreds of kilometres criss-cross through parts of Germany in disastrous conditions that defy description or obvious rationale. The prisoners were at this stage of the war plainly not of any use as forced labour (even if capable of working). And given the pace of the Allied advance, they would, even if they reached their destinations, obviously fall in the near future into enemy hands. No consideration appears to have been given to the notion of killing all the prisoners in the camps, which, given the speed of the Allied advance, would in any case scarcely have been practicable. But if those removed were eventually going to be killed anyway, there was little logic to the lengthy treks beforehand. Himmler had not, it is true, given up expectation that the prisoners – or the Jews among them – could be used as pawns in some deal with the Allies. As long as they were alive and within his power, they might still serve a purpose in his illusory scheme.
This dubious rationale apart, the death marches were completely pointless, except as a means of inflicting still further enormous suffering on those designated as the regime’s internal enemies. But the commandants and the guards treating the prisoners on the marches with such sadistic brutality did not seek any rationale. Their system still functioned – after a fashion. They remained, even in its dissolution, set in the same mentality that had earlier seen them torture prisoners pointlessly or force them to carry out pointless backbreaking labour.111 Ultimately, by April 1945 the regime just did not know what to do with the hundreds of thousands of prisoners still in its domain. In the gathering chaos of the last weeks, the death marches reflected the futile flailing of a regime on th
e verge of its own destruction but retaining its murderous capacity to the very end.
As the regime collapsed, decisions on what to do with the prisoners were left increasingly to those guarding them. Only unclear or confused guidelines, though leaving much scope for initiative, came from Himmler and the now faltering concentration camp central administration. Camp commandants were wary of acting prematurely, so gave evacuation orders at the last minute. Max Pauly, commandant of Neuengamme, near Hamburg, told interrogators after the war that in April 1945 he did not know what to do with his prisoners.112 When the marches set out, the fate of the prisoners was entirely in the hands of their guards – by this time far from all SS men, and including many drawn from the Volkssturm. How many were firm believers in Nazi ideology, or even genuine regime loyalists, cannot be known. But all had been in some way ‘schooled’ in how to deal with the ‘enemies of the people’. There was no control over the guards’ actions, no sanction for what they did. Their decisions on who should live or die were arbitrary.
Prisoners were dispatched without a thought on a daily basis by guards to whom they were totally anonymous, lacking all identity. One blond-haired SS guard, only about twenty years old, casually shot a thirteen-year-old boy on a march from Sachsenhausen because he could not keep up with the fast pace, almost running speed. In their anger and despair, the boy’s elder brother, a Jesuit priest, and his father tried to jump on the SS man, but he simply ‘fired a few volleys from his machine gun at them’. ‘The machine guns rattled unceasingly’ as many prisoners were mowed down in the first two days. When, after a night in a barn, one prisoner refused to continue the march, the same young SS brute simply shot him dead, then a few minutes later turned his gun on the prisoner’s distraught brother-in-law who had lagged behind. By now, the blond SS man simply ‘pulled out prisoners who, in his opinion, did not walk fast enough and shot them on the spot’.113